Visitors

This weekend, for American Thanksgiving, I had Philip, his girlfriend Cailey, and four of her college girlfriends in my home. All of the girls are majoring in something to do with gaming: programming games, designing games, creating art for the games, writing scripts for games. Then there’s Philip playing them in his free moments. The rest of us stick to card games and board games. We played Hand-and-Foot and Scum. Philip introduced us to Dominion. As the group played, I remembered how easily kids laugh at the smallest things, infecting one another until the whole group is laughing at hilarity. I also remembered how much I like having friends comfortable around my table, laughing, eating, talking, and how I don’t need to be in the center of it, just around, enjoying it like a good dessert.

When the topic of Thanksgiving celebrations came up, two of the girls said their families don’t celebrate Thanksgiving. It’s just a holiday for them. They’re American born, but from Asian immigrant families. I think they said something like, “We don’t really get Thanksgiving.” It was an Oz moment. If you don’t grow up being taught about Pilgrims and turkeys and dinners with Indians, the holiday doesn’t feel as important. When I’m in Mexico, I celebrate Thanksgiving, but it’s hard to celebrate with Mexican friends, because the idea of a sit down meal at a specified time in the middle of the day doesn’t make as much sense to some of them—and where’s the salsa? On the other hand, I don’t celebrate Day of the Dead, but this holiday weighs on the hearts of my Mexican friends, especially if they have lost a loved one. They ache to celebrate it, and if their church forbids that, they feel the tension.

Culture clash is like that. We ache for different things, and these aches don’t make sense to people who didn’t grow up with you. And eventually they affect your culture, and things change from how you remember them. So many people in our world know this. It’s hard to give up your Thanksgivings, Days of the Dead, Tet, or whatever traditions you’ve held dear, to see them eroded by the great migrations of our day.

And in Old Testament times, God protected his people from these changes. “Force all the Canaanites from your lands,” he said. “Don’t intermarry,” he said. “Keep the feasts,” he said… “in Jerusalem.” If you’ve read Ralph Winter’s article in Perspectives on the World Christian Movement, you know that in Old Testament times, God meant to draw all the people of the world to his presence at His Temple. In Jerusalem. The Jews were meant to have this incredible culture that would draw people to God, an inexorable, centripetal force. The world would come to Him there.

But today, we are not in Old Testament times. We are not expected to keep the feasts. We are no longer set apart and different. No. Now we are in New Testament times, Centrifugal times, sent into the world, to its very last corners, to live among people just like Jesus lived among us. And this might mean living next to people who have immigrated into our country and are very different from us. Having different customs, even different faiths. They might not get Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or a myriad of other things, including Jesus himself. And so we might we might see our traditions worn away by people different from us, and it might hurt, but it’s our calling as Christians to go, to leave behind what is beautiful to us, and go. To knock on our neighbor’s door (our literal neighbor now) and welcome her without fear, knowing that her presence in our neighborhood will change things, and that’s ok, because God has sent her.

And it’s no coincidence that the tale of the Good Samaritan is set on a road, where people of different races and religions are traveling, maybe migrating, maybe forced by economics or politics to cross paths, and in this story, Jesus makes the Muslim the good guy, stopping to help a Christian left bleeding. Who is our neighbor?

Our church is deliberating whether to sponsor a Syrian refugee family here in Niagara that the Canadian government has approved. Rightfully, there are concerns, but this is my take on it.  

Toolbox

We went to see our new grand-nephew yesterday, two weeks old, all hunched over in a huddle, soft and warm, wiggling and squirming like a tight nest of bunnies. He didn’t know why he wiggled. Some small discomfort. And as hunger pangs grew, he grew more fidgety and started letting out those little newborn squeaks that bypass your brain and hit you straight in the liver or wherever it is feelings are supposed to reside. Then he scrunched his little eyes shut and you could see it coming before it hit you, the tiny forlorn wail. He was a bundle of need.

And I thought about how God gave us all a bundle of feelings to deal with, and how differently we use them, and how we learn to mete out our feelings differently as we grow and change our priorities. For this baby, the wail could be a wet diaper or a burp coming, or a minute past feeding time. Or it could be something more dire. Impossible to tell without being mom and knowing your child. You learn to guess well.

Then as parents, you are so tempted to react when your children cry, “But it’s a small thing. Why waste your bag of emotions on that? There are so much bigger things.” There are, indeed, starving children in Syria. But this makes no sense to the child, because they have drawn from the same bag you have and spent that emotion on that particular care because it seems worthy to them. A child will wail at a crushed toy, a lost blanket, a being-left-behind-for-the-evening. And you can comfort them because to you, this loss isn’t significant. “Significant” changes as you grow.

It doesn’t help to challenge the reasons your kids feel, to interrupt their stories. Once the cat is out of the bag, the emotion spent, you can’t put it back. Reasoning that the thing was not big enough to cry over doesn’t help. They’ve cried already. Our preacher told us a story in church of an athlete who faced cancer himself. Lost part of his jaw to it. And a child. And missed playing in the Superbowl by an inch. I struggled to relate because it made me feel my story was so small; why tell it? And on the other hand, why so much fuss over a Superbowl?  I’m so sorry you couldn’t get in the Superbowl.

As life moves us in and out of pain and loss, we learn to manage our bag of tricks differently, saving our emotions for the things that really matter, a moving target. The little things don’t trouble us anymore because we’ve tasted the big ones. But sometimes we lose, along with our intolerance for pain, our capacity for joy. We forget to rejoice at the little things as we’ve forgotten to cry when lunch takes too long.

Life is a lesson in adjustments. We are constantly pulling together the drawstrings of reason and emotion, trying to knit the outfit together, because since the dawn of time, these two have become estranged, and we end up spilling our bag of emotions on the ground, wasting anger, sorrow, joy, contentment on things that are undeserving. Or we judge the emotions of others by our own priorities and miss their pain because it’s unreasonable to us. I know a man who walked into the home of a widow two weeks after her husband’s death and told her to move on. He could not read her pain. Maybe knitting reasons and emotions together is one of the greatest changes God makes in us in the end, healing this chasm and letting us read one another well. When we are with Him, and our priorities are renovated, what thing could cause us pain? What loss could we mourn? Meanwhile we are in trade school, with this toolbox, learning.

Rust

Final radiation treatment today.Yay!  Get to see Dr. Blue & Brown again, too, after three months. I want to ask him why certain parts of my body don’t work right any more. The radiologist says it can’t be his fault since radiation targets one small, (you think so, doc?) concentrated area (and if you kill off one part of the body, of course no other part of the body feels that).

I’ve got my theory all worked out to try out on him: I noticed that the chemo dissolved my fingernails, leaving them milky white and with six distinct ridges, one for each treatment. They will take months to grow back normally. So what if the rust in my joints is something like that, too? What if the chemo kind of turned them to mush a bit, and that mush just needs to work itself out of my system? I’m willing to go with that. I can wait, as long as there’s a promise that life will finally get back to normal some day, and I can bend my thumbs again, and hold a pencil, and chop food, and walk up stairs effortlessly. I’m bargaining. It’s one of those stages of grief.  I have the whole plan worked out.

NEVER DO THAT. Because when the doctor blows holes in your theory, you have nowhere to go. “Your joints are inflamed,” he says. “It happens. No, there’s nothing you can do, nothing you can take, no diet you can go on. Arthritis doesn’t usually go away. It’s not reversible.”

Did he just say arthritis? Am I in the right clinic? What is he talking about? I came to this appointment so he can help me take care of some side effects from the chemo, and he’s adding arthritis to the list of things I have to fight for the rest of my life. He’s so empathetic, and my husband, sitting in the chair in the other corner is no better. Now that the bargaining has fallen through, I’m mad.

Lot of good that does. So I move on to grief. Today was supposed to be a celebration day, my last radiation, and Robert has promised to take me out to dinner, but I’m just sad. After Dr. Blue and Brown, I move to the chemo lounge. A nurse brings my prescription for an estrogen blocker that I am to take for five years. “It may make your symptoms worse,” she says. I’m called to the chemo chair. It’s a nurse I’ve not met before. After that, I walk downstairs to my final radiation treatment. “Good luck! Come back and tell us how things are going,” Dianne says. (She’s good! I’d never think of suggesting such a thing. Would you go back to a clinic to tell the therapists how you’re doing? Arthritis and all?)

One moment of light in the darkness: I am waiting in the chemo lounge for my chair, and a young studious looking woman in dark glasses and long, straight dirty blond hair sits next to me with a clip board.  I’m used to people coming up to me in chemo lounges now, though I’m surprised she’s not wearing the bumble-bee vest of the volunteers. Come to find out, she’s a grad student at Laurier doing her thesis on how the arts help you when you’re a patient at the hospital, and she wants me to be in her experiment. She’s going to put me in a group of other cancer patients and teach us all to play Christmas carols on a ukulele. A ukulele!  I’m going to play a ukulele, dead thumbs and all! I’m excited already. We get to perform at the end of it when she does her final presentation. How cool is that! You’re all invited.

And afterwards Robert and I go to our friends’ house, (we had texted them and asked if we could just come in the evening, and they said yes and saved the day), and while the snow falls in huge flakes outside the window, Michelle and I sit in the kitchen and eat apple pie, and I feel safe to be sad, and she empathizes, and even reminds me, “Doctors can be wrong, you know.” Doctors can be wrong.  Doctor Blue &Brown, please be wrong. And we move to other things (like honeymoons), and the evening ends well. Tomorrow is another day.

Play houses

Now that the leaves have disappeared from the trees, leaving so many crooked spikes to hold up the grey skies, the dreys stand out. I thought these bunches of leaves crammed in the forks of branches were bird’s nests, big bird’s nests. In Oaxaca, I watch parrots weave their nests in crooks of trees, so I assumed some other bird did the same thing here. But they aren’t bird nests. They are squirrels’ nests. The thought of those little furry bodies bunched in those leafy nests high up and out on a limb, exposed to earth and sky, makes me smile.

Robert researched the phenomenon for me, surprised that after all these years I didn’t know what dreys were. Canada always holds new surprises for me (that the government sends you reminders to do screening tests for cancer; that the corn tortillas have wheat in them). Dreys hold together because the squirrels start with green twigs, leaves attached, and weave everything into these to make a tight shell, leaving the top open in the summer for ventilation. Juvenile squirrels play at house-making, building little floppy nests that fall apart, their play-houses, tree-houses. Squirrels leave their nests when they get over-run with bugs—lice or flees. Their nests look so precarious, out there on a limb, to discourage predators, but I saw a raccoon hanging by its hands from a telephone wire once, so I know they would try. Maybe the limb shaking warns the little guys in time, a vibration alarm.

As a teacher I’m fascinated with how God engineers learning right into our instincts. We learn. We grow. We develop. This has to be one aspect in which we reflect God. I think of kittens pouncing on strings, and puppies sniffing out toys, and birds pushing their babies out of nests, and squirrels building play-houses. We practice until we are perfect. That is what this life is about. We are God’s juvenile squirrels building things that fall apart in this life. Sometimes they fall right out of the tree, leaving us exposed to the elements and the creeping raccoons. We feel the vibrations under feet as the limb shakes. But He who began a good work in you will continue until it is finished. “It is finished.”

God loves babies. Jesus began ministry as a baby. He spent more years being God as a child, learning Scripture and carpentry, than being God as a man, doing miracles and telling stories. He spent more time learning to saw boards and to plane them smooth and straight, just as His father taught him, breathing in the pine smell, listening to the rhythmic scruff of the plane, than He did  training His disciples. We so often think of him as the Teacher that we forget how long he spent as the Student.

I have gone so far as to wonder what this quality of God looks like in heaven. Is teaching finished there? Is learning? I have sent an application ahead to heaven for one learning job and one teaching job. I want to learn to be a dancer. I want to dance for God there because there is no chance for that here. Nope. But I also want to be a teacher in heaven. You know all those babies aborted, those sons and daughters miscarried, who never saw a drey perched in the sky in the arms of a tree? I want to teach those kids about God’s wonders—the earth and sky, and squirrels, and kittens, and books and dancing and history, and me. What God did for me. I want to be a teacher for God. I practice a lot now, getting ready, creating my floppy play-houses in the sky, but the day is coming when I’ll get my dream job. Both of them.

Hockey. Who is going to teach those kids about hockey?

Or tlayudas?

Or laser printers?

There’s room for you. Appy here: ________________________________________

Those women

Elai, in her Sociology class, has been researching an issue that is more and more concerning to her and to all of us: human trafficking. I am helping her find sources for her paper and am learning more than I want to know. Elai first learned about human trafficking and the sex trade when she read Half the Sky in high school (the book describes how women are treated in different parts of the world, reminding us that something like 100 million girls are simply missing in the world because of neglect and discrimination; read it. It’s also a six part documentary on Netflix). Now she is studying how one country put a new kind of law into effect that has had a noticeable effect on the sex trade in that country and has caused other countries to sit up and take notice. Many are considering similar kinds of laws.

The Swedish government has taken the stance that prostitutes are often victims, coerced by economics, trauma, or force to do something no human should have to do. The ones driving prostitution, the ones with the power, are the clients, almost always men. Without men demanding it, the supply would disappear.  And when the sex trade diminishes, then sex traffic goes down along with it. So Sweden has enacted a law that prosecutes only the clients and lets the (usually) women go free. Once the law was in effect, the number of johns prosecuted quadrupled, and the number of women walking the streets plummeted. Swedish men now think twice about hunting for a prostitute, because if they go to trial, their wives find out. Over the years, while prostitution and sex trafficking has grown in countries where prostitution is legal, Sweden’s numbers remain stable.

At the other extreme is Holland, who decided many years ago to take a pragmatic approach. After all, “boys will be boys,” and everyone will be better off if we just accept the inevitable. Holland has ten times the prostitutes of Sweden and an enormous problem with sex trafficking, violence toward women, and child abuse. Most of Europe’s  trade of children goes through Holland. And this one piece of data really got to me: the pedophile lobby in Holland is very strong, pushing to allow children their “sexual freedom,” and they have gained legal victories including this one: sexual abuse of children over 12 is now illegal only if the child or a parent complains.  Talk about a slippery slope.

And at this point I am stalled. I think about how this stuff happens within minutes of my home in Oaxaca, just a short drive to certain downtown streets, or to the brothels in Xoxo, where, I’m told, Central American women are trafficked. And here, a half an hour away from me, Niagara Falls boasts of its “escort” services. And like all horrible causes, this moves me, but these people remain invisible to me.

I am called elsewhere. My family serves a different vulnerable people. Among these people, the fathers say they “sell” their daughters in marriage, charging exorbitant sums for them (for they are beautiful, as all young women are). When some of these fathers met Jesus, they decided it would honor their daughters to stop this custom. God changed the way these men looked at women. I like that.

I hope Sweden’s experiment works well and can be tried in other countries, chipping away at the number of men who hurt women and calling to account those that drive the system with their money.  Of course that’s not all that’s needed.  The thing is complicated, and laws don’t solve the problem, especially if they don’t reflect a consensus. They only punish and deter. They don’t change attitudes toward women, especially those women. I’m not sure how much studying the topic changes anything. It must, but it feels big and foreign and elusive, a horrifying research project. Lord, may there be many, many competent people fighting this battle, too.

LEGO

While Robert was gone, Janey invited me over to help her put together a secretariat desk and wardrobe from IKEA. When we couldn’t figure out how to get the thingy out of the power drill, Dan stepped in, and Janey made supper while Dan and I finished assembling the furniture because we all agreed that IKEA and spouses don’t mix any more than spouses and wall-papering. The bit about the power drill (shouldn’t it be called a power screw driver?) tells you how much I help Robert assemble things in the shop (not). But I must say that if you can handle twisting a screwdriver for six hours or steadying a power tool for three, you can put IKEA furniture together. They give you LEGO instructions for each step (I’m advising Philip that if he doesn’t get a job with LEGO he could work for IKEA, the big people LEGO store), picture books and all. I bet the inventor of IKEA put together lots of LEGO kits when he was four.

IKEA and LEGO are very ironic products, because they are pieces mass-produced on assembly lines (probably by the robots that Dan creates in his shop, adding to the irony), but they are designed so that you can be innovative and feel a sense of accomplishment and ownership when you assemble the mass-produced, identical pieces, yourself, into something impossible and original (to you). You infuse uniqueness into sameness. Craftsmanship into factory work. That is a God thing.

I’m glad for assembly lines. They make IKEA and LEGO and Toyotas possible. They also make it possible for me to survive cancer. Today I went to the hospital twice. Muga Scan. Check. Radiation. Check. Doctor visit. Check. Lab test. Check. When Henry Ford rolled his Model T’s off his assembly line in 1908 for just under $900, he made it possible for hospitals to invent integrated cancer clinics that slide you in and out of CT machines, and Linear Accelerators, and Chemo chairs in minutes, distributing the cost among thousands of customers. I am aware that it is the efficiency of the system that makes it possible for Canada’s health system to take care of one more stranger walking in the door. Bravo. I asked myself inside the Muga Machine whether the technologist knew that I get IV infusions that can wreck my heart muscles, and that is why I am lying on her table again. Does she know the part she plays in keeping me healthy along with the 20 other patients that fill her day?

We see the effects of Henry Ford’s gift to the world everywhere: in our grocery stores, where we can buy gala apples or hass avocados in any store across the continent, or in our schools, where every student is guaranteed the same curriculum program, or in our churches, where people move in and out of warehouse-looking buildings, receiving the latest, greatest teachings and worshippings. If we didn’t have these things, we’d miss out. We’d die of cancer or ignorance.

As we know, God produces on a mass scale, turning out kitties and rose buds and little human babies that look more or less the same each time, but somehow no two things He makes are ever the same. And he uses organic assembly lines, our bodies, to build new cells and keep our engines running, all the members staying on task toward a common goal of survival or maybe just points in a video game. But God makes something new every time He puts the pieces together. How does he do that! Because when things start feeling monotonous, the same ‘ol, same ‘ol, we need to remember that although faithfulness is required, monotony is not His style.

Jan Vormann cleaning up the city

What’s he making out of us, his IKEA pieces, his LEGO blocks? Cool thing is that we get to decide that for ourselves, picking each other up off the ground and fitting one another together (don’t you just love that squeeky, creeky sound of LEGO blocks fitting just right?) into a wonderful new invention that we will own and love because it’s us, us including Jesus. We are assembling something made from millions of pieces, made by millions of members, a one-off impossible creature. Ahhh. So if it gets tough on the line, think of that.

Gunmen

Here we are again. A stand-off with the Law. But while the police upheld civil law, the others were on the side of Law. Those gunmen laying waste to people in a theatre hall were coldly killing because their victims did not follow the Law of God…as the Gunmen saw it. They left a country bewildered—half a world bewildered—about why a handful of men would try to enforce their understanding of God’s Law with bullets. And then they blew themselves up to reap their reward. That’s a lot of faith. And we know they have not learned what God has always known and what we are barely learning: that you cannot force Law on people, or not for long. You can’t force anything on people—not for long—not even Love.

In the 1530’s a group of radical Protestants called Anabaptists (re-baptizers) tried this. They set up a society in Munster, Germany, where God’s Law was enforced by violence, and their rebellion was betrayed and taken apart by violence and internal corruption, their leaders tortured and hung in cages outside the city walls, which are there to this day. In response, the Anabaptist movement chose a non-violent path in responding to tyranny and violence that they have offered to the world ever since.

A few years ago I set up for one of our school chapels a debate between Robert, an Anabaptist, and Carter, a Presbyterian, who believed in just war (fighting to stop evil). But to mix things up a bit, I had Robert defend the just war position and gave the peace position to Carter. They had to defend the other side from what they believed.  Carter had far more experience with the debate format, but Robert, of course, was just as good an arguer. Most of the kids at school are gung ho about weapons and the military, so they wanted Robert to win the debate, but they had all taken debate class from Carter. He knew his stuff! That was the quietest chapel on record. You could have heard a pen drop.

While this is yet another subject on which Christians have to agree to disagree, we do have to think about our response to violence and authority and especially imposed authority. Paul said, “Slaves, obey your masters.” What if, heaven forbid, we were enslaved by ISIS? (For a picture of this, read John Hersey’s White Lotus where the Chinese come on ships to America and take them away as slaves). Yet (finally) we know slavery and tyranny of all kinds is wrong. We (finally) understand we were all created for freedom. We know that we can use violence to stop things that are wrong. It’s why we have police who enforce the law and stop gunmnen.

So let’s talk about Law. The Gunmen of our world have an understanding of God’s Law and want to impose it on us. We know this is wrong. But do we do this to others? Do we try to legislate Law for other people that they don’t understand or share? Oh, we say, but our Law is the right one. Yes, maybe so, but it’s the imposition on others that’s the problem.  When Jesus came to fulfill the Law, he came not to give us a new set of regulations, but a Law that would be written on our hearts, in our consciences, and in our minds. It would be the Great Law, the only Law really: Love. All the laws derive from this. And this is the Law out of which God created us and gave us freedom from Him to make our own choices and even Fall and drag Him down to Hell with us. He gave us Law as a Tutor to lead us to Jesus, who would set us free from all Law on the one hand, and make us his slaves and his servants to all, on the other. The paradox of Grace. He persuades us so that we give him everything, all power and authority and trust. We give it freely, willingly, joyfully. He forces nothing and requires everything, and we learn the difference.

So when Christian leaders lead, they do not lord it over anyone but serve everyone. They demand nothing, least of all submission. They love. And those who have learned to trust them follow freely because they choose to. When pastors lead, they demand nothing, least of all submission. They love. And those in their care follow freely because they choose to. And when husbands lead, they demand nothing, least of all submission. They love. And wives follow freely because they choose to. In the Kingdom of God, there is no such thing as positional authority, where you gain authority simply by assuming a job and a title. All authority is earned. There is no external Law, only that which is written on our hearts.

Those gunmen have not learned about true law or true authority. They still think they can impose both by force. And for a time, perhaps they can. But ultimately, they will lose. And so will we to the very extent we forget the Law of Love and apply (however mildly) their method. We grieve with France. We grieve with Syria. We grieve over what made those Gunmen do what they did. We may not be able to do much. At least we should apply what we do know right where we are, “that the world may know.”